Let’s get one thing straight—popups work.

Its efficacy depends on various factors like timing, quality, and relevance—but by and large, popups help catch the attention of your audience and raise your conversions. And given that, exit intent popups have become very popular recently.

Exit intent popups work by catching your visitors at that critical moment when they’re about to bounce off your website. Typically, the popup will help present something that visitors find of value—a discount, freebie, or some kind of incentive—that will ultimately prevent them from leaving.

But just because you have the mechanism in place doesn’t mean that you will get the results you want. The effectiveness of a popup is dependent on several factors. So let’s take a look at how you can optimize your exit intent popups—

1. Make sure you target the right visitors

This boils down to how well you actually know your audience. Your site’s visitors end up on your site for different reasons—it could be for a particular product you’re selling, it could be because they’re doing research, or because they already have something specific in mind and are set on completing a purchase.

To maximize your exit intent popups, make sure that you’re presenting them to visitors who actually have expressed interest in becoming a customer.

Try—

• Segmenting visitors based on their activity on your site. You can present an exit intent popup to visitors who have viewed multiple pages on your website, or who are abandoning products in their cart, or users who have spent time on your blog.
• Targeting visitors based on their location—this helps you get good leads based on tactical and strategic information, which could prove to be more effective for conversions.
• Reaching out to visitors who don’t scroll through, on your landing page—perhaps a little incentivized action is all they need to keep clicking and reviewing your site.

2. Remember to keep your exit popups relevant

You could be targeting and reaching out to the right audience, but if your offer isn’t relevant to how they are interacting with your site, product or service, then it might serve only to ruin the user experience.

Make sure that—

• You offer discounts for products that visitors are actually viewing. Avoid presenting offers or deals for items that your user knows nothing about.  If a popup offer is pitching a discount for a product that your user was viewing, there’s a greater chance that they will convert.
• You secure a good lead by offering time contingent offers such as discounts or exclusive coupons.
• You promote good offers and special deals that deliver on promise.

3. Provide customer support

As much as, you’d like to assume that your visitors are savvy online shoppers, keep in mind that they are probably busy, easily distracted, and no matter how great they are with gadgets, they will still struggle with complicated online checkouts.

An exit popup could simplify the process by providing customer support.

You could—

• Use an exit intent popup to offer help or assistance to address customer concerns
• Reach out to visitors abandoning cart and sign-ups and present another level of engagement.
• Gain key insight into why they are abandoning and not completing the checkout process.

4. Use psychological triggers

The reason why exit popups work is because you’re catching visitor attention at a key moment—that point where they’re about to leave your site. At this point, you can present a psychological trigger to ensure better conversions—

• Present social proof to show how many people like the product and service you are offering.
• Play on the visitors fear of missing out by adding a time limit to your discount or offer.
• Demonstrate trust for your brand by highlighting the number of  people who have already availed your offer.

5. Be conscious of how you write the copy

Keep in mind that the average attention span of online users is less than 9 seconds. That means, you have very limited time to present the benefits of your offer once your exit intent popup appears.

Remember that—

• The most your visitors will give your popup is a glance, so make sure copy is scannable.
• Keep it short, simple and clean so that information can easily be digested.
• Spell out what you want your users to do—click yes or no, signup or no—don’t confuse them by complicating the process or by letting them guess what you want them to do.

If you don’t already have an exit popup mechanism in place, it might be time to check out how you can make the most out of this tool and gain conversions. Once you do, give these simple tips a try to improve your exit popup’s performance.

If you need help turning traffic into conversions, sign up for our free trial and see for yourself what we can do for you. 

And if you have any questions or would like to share more ways on improving exit pops, feel free to share in the comment section below.